Before their divorce, my parents never fought. It was a point of pride and ultimately pain, meant to signal theirs was a marriage that shouldn’t have ended. The media supported this belief – divorce was for couples who fought constantly while happy couples rarely did.

I was twenty-one, a recent college graduate, in the midst of figuring out my life and who I was, and standing at the altar committing my life to my high school sweetheart… or at least the next five years of my life. Those five years were good for the most part. We built a beautiful home, had great jobs, were saving for our future, and tried for kids over and over. But as the years went on, we started to grow apart.

If you’ve come to the blog looking for my latest furniture recreation or DIY tutorial you won’t find either in this post. What you will find, however, is an update on why things have been a little slow around the online homefront lately. As both a ‘Hey, here’s what’s going on’ and the official segue into a new writing adventure I’ve accepted an assignment that let’s me put pen to paper while my power tools take a break.

Surprise. I’m divorced. Yes, that’s correct, I’ve cannon balled into the metaphoric pool of American statistics. And I couldn’t be happier. Why? Because we weren’t happy: that’s why. And since I’m a solid believer of the idea that people control their own happiness, it seemed like the logical thing to do for both of us. I mean, after all, our matrimony was pretty much a fluke. I married the man who knocked me up after four months of dating.

"I Always Thought I’d Make a Good Spy. Like Jason Bourne, I’d speak fluent English, French, Russian, Dutch, German, Swedish, and Spanish; my other special skills would include hand-to-hand combat; a mix of Filipino Kali and Jeet Kune Do and Krav Maga. I’d have supreme efficiency in handling numerous vehicles, and would possess a Brazilian passport with a Portuguese name: “Gilberta de Piento.”"

Enough time has passed I can look back on my divorce with some 20/20 hindsight (well at least I didn’t lose my mind in the process). Let’s be real, while you’re in the middle of the ongoing drama, dealing with hurt feelings, I can honestly say that I learned a lot—one must get something out of all that chaos. Divorce is a nightmare, let’s be real and not try to sugarcoat it.

I remember when the movie Knocked Up with Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen came out in 2007. I cheered that a completely secular movie had the theme it did: A single woman finds herself pregnant from a one-night stand–and she doesn’t get an abortion. In fact, she only considers it for about 3 minutes of the movie. It was a sign that our culture was thinking differently about abortion, because it wasn’t remotely a faith-based movie (it was actually rather crude).

“Daddy, I just soo love you,” is what I used to say to my dad every day and every night before he boarded a plane back to Antigua without his wife, without his son, and without me, the little brown girl that sooo loved her daddy.

Sarah Jessica Parker returns to HBO in the new comedy series, DIVORCE. Parker stars as Frances, a woman who suddenly begins to reassess her life and her marriage, and finds that making a clean break and a fresh start is harder than she thought. Wow, can I relate! I distinctly remember when I first realized my ex-husband had checked out. We… well I, was talking in the kitchen.

Divorce Sweepstakes on BlogHer runs from 9/26/16 through 10/23/16 and is only open to individuals who, at the time of entry deadline, are legal residents of the United States and are 18 years or older. Click "here" to read the official rules. Winners will be randomly selected from all eligible entries. Good luck!